Back in the ’90s, Gary Oldman looked like a guy who could play the doomed country-music legend Hank Williams. This was when he was well into his 30s, with the high forehead, the gaunt cheeks, the thin lips and the hawklike nose reminiscent of Williams’. And Oldman could certainly find the haunted eyes, as he’d played all manner of troubled and tortured types. All that was missing was a script and a studio willing to make such a film.

Zip ahead to 2015, when Oldman was a good 20 years too old to play the part, and Tom Hiddleston stepped into Williams’ boots in “I Saw the Light.” He had the high forehead, the gaunt cheeks, the thin lips and hawklike nose. He found the haunted eyes. All that was missing was a script.

For every musical biopic smash like “Ray” or “Walk the Line,” there’s a crash like “I Saw the Light” or “Great Balls of Fire.” Talk to filmmakers, and they cringe at the word “biopic,” as the duty to re-create the lionized musical hero of fans can be a burden even the best scripts, or intentions, can’t escape.

“We definitely were mindful of the curse of the biopic,” said Damien Chazelle, director of the new Neil Armstrong film “First Man” — a biographical film, albeit not a musical one. Unlike a lot of music biopics, which use the music as a crutch, his film found an interesting character, and his story nestled in the known history about the first man to step onto the moon.

“This movie had to be about little moments like Armstrong running his hand through his daughter’s hair,” he said. “It needed to be about that more than ‘the greatest hits.’ These big events that you expect. They can’t dictate the style.”

A dearth of satisfying music biopics has done nothing to dissuade Hollywood from making new ones. This week bears “Bohemian Rhapsody,” about the gloriously epic rock band Queen and its gloriously epic frontman, Freddie Mercury. Next year Elton John will be reproduced in “Rocketman.”

Both films come packaged with striking trailers because music-biopic trailers always look good: They’re like music videos, with uncountable cuts, meticulously designed costumes and lead actors who admirably channel their subjects. Both films had red flags as well. In the case of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the flags are the fact that:

Great Balls of Cash

A few music biopics have hit pay dirt at the box office:

“La Bamba” made $54 million in 1987, equivalent to about $118 million today.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter” made $67 million in 1980, about $202 million today.

“Ray” made $75 million in 2004.

“Walk the Line” made $119 million in 2005.

“Straight Outta Compton” earned $161 million in 2015.

“Amadeus” earned $52 million in 1984, about $124 million today.

THROWING TOMATOES

Some of the worst-reviewed music biopics, according to Rotten Tomatoes:

2. It’s rated PG-13. Freddie Mercury lived many lives in his 45 years, and none of them were PG-13.

The reasons these films keep getting made are pretty obvious. They don’t require much in the way of modern special effects, so they have a budgetary safety valve. Music biopics also have built-in iconography, so marketing efforts don’t start cold. They have historically courted awards-season votes, if not for the films then for the pantomimed performances of their lead actors.

Speaking of those performances, music biopics haven’t been an Oscar goldmine over the past 15 years, but films based on real characters have: Of the 150 Academy Award nominees for best actor and actress in that period, more than a quarter have been actors playing historical characters rather than fictional ones. Which is fine: A good story is a good story. But that requires telling a good story well. And music biopics rarely do. They’re crafted with a hardwired natural narrative that is easy to follow:

1. Child (category: rural, poor) shows particular talent.

2. Child endures childhood trauma.

3. Child grows into prodigy.

4. Montage of an outpouring of creative greatness the likes of which has never been seen.

5. Fame.

6. Fortune.

7. Fall.

8. Redemption.

The boilerplate has been cast such that a film parodied the music biopic looking for laughs. But it bears noting that this film, “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” was released 11 years ago.

Yet the biopics continue to sing and dance, plugging in marginally different content into old templates. Take the narrative frame. “Bohemian Rhapsody” uses Queen’s performance at the ’80s mega-concert Live Aid as its set of bookends. These narrative devices have become almost cynical in their trickery: cinematic implements to make a viewer think they’re seeing art rather than artifice.

Familiar begets familiar, and financial successes such as “Ray” ($75 million), “Walk the Line” ($119 million) and “Coal Miner’s Daughter” ($67 million, and 1980 dollars at that) often hold greater sway over Hollywood pocketbooks than the failures — even though only one of those three biopics was a particularly good film.

This homogeneity becomes a problem in a medium in which the audience is supposed to suspend disbelief. The insistence on reproducing the known narrative repeatedly prompts thoughts of the known narrative. These films function like a dramatic reinterpretation on “Unsolved Mysteries.” They’re inadvertently begging you to call their bluff.

But they’re not all bad. Some of the better music biopics have found their voice by avoiding a cradle-to-grave narrative and instead emphasizing a tight focus on aspects of their subjects’ lives.

“Greetings From Tim Buckley” was saddled with a title that dared viewers not to watch. (Note: Viewers took the dare; the film, admittedly a niche production, made $11,000 at the box office.) But the emphasis on a purely musical connection between a son and the father he never knew was an actual story rather than a Cliff’s Notes version of a musician’s biography.

In his Miles Davis film, “Miles Ahead,” Don Cheadle focused on the late 1970s, which was right about the time Davis’ music ceased to be revelatory in its repeated regeneration. His indulgences were consuming him, and music finally raced ahead of him. A man out of time: That is a story.

“Sid and Nancy,” well, neither of its subjects were musicians, really. So this biopic about the infamous punk couple wasn’t burdened by that. Its story, at heart, dealt with the results of an inadvisable romance between tinder and flame: a smeared, pierced “Romeo and Juliet” story, which starred Oldman.

“Amadeus” came with a titular subject so long dead as to feel remote, biographically speaking. If Mozart had the equivalent of a concert at San Quentin State Prison, most viewers didn’t know about it. Milos Forman’s film also had a well-developed villain in Antonio Salieri, which many musical biopics do not. The richness of Salieri stretched the film’s thematic content beyond, “Here’s a rehashed story about a guy who made music.” “Amadeus” captured ideas in conflict: brilliance and desperation, inspiration and envy, and the ways these characteristics can present themselves both creative and destructive.

“What’s Love Got to Do With It” also had a villain, which worked in its favor, though he didn’t add much thematic depth to this Tina Turner biopic.

An obscure subject also helps. Ethan Hawke has been on both sides of the music biopic. He played Chet Baker in “Born to Be Blue,” and he directed this year’s “Blaze,” about the late songwriter Blaze Foley.

“Blue” wasn’t a biographical film about Baker but rather the story about an addled and addicted musician struggling to find a creative voice after the one he’d used for years was taken from him.

“Blaze” does away with origin story and focuses on the tenuous relationship between writer and muse, and the destructive results when art comes first.

“Blaze was perfect because if you do a movie about Johnny Cash, there are certain things you have to hit,” Hawke said. “Fans want this or that. They saw a photo shoot, so you do that photo shoot. But that’s watching a re-enactment, which is boring. I decided I kind of loathed biopics. Doing a movie about somebody who is unknown meant I got to do a portrait of an artist without doing a biopic.

“The point of a lot of biopics is to teach you about a person. It becomes a greatest-hits album.”

The Cash biopic bears mention because by most measures it was a success. The film earned more than four times its reported budget, so it was a box-office hit. It earned five Academy Award nominations, including acting noms for Joaquin Phoenix, who played Cash, and Reese Witherspoon, who played June Carter Cash. Witherspoon was the only win. Worth noting: It wasn’t nominated for best picture or screenplay because, well, the story felt rote.

Cash’s peak ran from the mid-’50s into the ’70s, so despite his Man in Black persona, he had none of the opacity afforded Mozart. He can be heard on widely distributed recordings and seen in easily available footage. The same can be said of “Ray,” which won Jamie Foxx an Oscar for playing Ray Charles. The performances are admirable. But the stories feel like a cheat. They condense a lifetime into a fine focus, then project it large. They further mythology and fail to offer much that feels relatable.

Having written recently about a Roy Orbison hologram tour, I’ve been intrigued at the disparity in the reception between hologram concerts, which have been widely derided, and music biopics, which at this point arrive like a new packet of M&Ms. Both the biopic and the hologram tour rely on sleight of hand to add some visual charge to the already visceral feel that music can provoke.

Admittedly, there exists a pure art at work in the music biopics, if nowhere else, in the acting. I do feel for the actors, who read, watch, listen and study their subjects in an effort to find some open window into a life already lived. Such work is challenging creatively as well as logistically: It’s one thing to nail the mannerisms, another entirely to nail the vocals, which obviously never match the originals. Doing so is more challenging with lousy scripts.

Orbison’s three sons oversaw a hologram tour that passed through Sugar Land last week. The production wasn’t simply footage of their late father projected large but rather the result of modern technology twisted together with unearthed audio and a production team of writers, directors and others with a theatrical background. They’re currently developing a biopic — and clearly wary of the path before them.

“We’re looking for the right director and the right actor,” said Alex Orbison, Roy’s son. “On one hand, you don’t want to do what’s been done before. You don’t want to redo ‘Walk the Line’ with another musician. On the other hand, it’s such fertile ground because of my dad’s mysterious nature. People are itching to discover more.”

Andrew Dansby covers music and other entertainment, both local and national, for the Houston Chronicle, 29-95.com and chron.com. He previously assisted the editor for George R.R. Martin, author of "Game of Thrones" and later worked on three "major" motion pictures you've never seen. That short spell in the film business nudged him into writing, first as a freelancer and later with Rolling Stone. He came to the Chronicle in 2004 as an entertainment editor and has since moved to writing full time.